My One Training Rule
“It’s one thing to feel that you are on the right path, but it’s another to think that yours is the only path.” – Paulo Coelho, novelist
Many people have a hard time remembering that their way isn’t the only way, whether it be in dog training, raising kids, cleaning house, driving, etc. I like to have as many tools in my dog training tool belt as possible because I have found that with the four dogs that I have (seriously) trained for competitive sports none of them learned the same way and I had to dig around at some point to find answers to their questions.
Yet time and again I run into people who are having a training issue and yet will not accept outside ideas because “this way has worked for all the other dogs I’ve trained.” So time passes and that person is still beating that same dead horse a year later or has gotten another dog out of frustration with the first. Melinda Wichman called it her ‘sacred cows of training’, meaning her training methods that have worked for her previous (OTCH) dogs. But she put those cows out to pasture and embraced new ideas and thoughts. I’m sure it was difficult for her as is with all things of which we are familiar. I did it with Trey in obedience. No repeating an exercise if she did it right the first time. No repetitions, no drilling, very few corrections. I learned that she had a skewed way of learning and I had to skew my training to match her, not try to make her match my training.
Friend Lois gave me some thoughts after my previous post and I truly appreciate those thoughts and suggestions. I’m going to try some of them out on Callen since my current methods aren’t making much of an impact on the naughty (still a) puppy.
So this quote is what I need to keep in the forefront of my brain when I am teaching Callen. It’s easy to fall back onto ‘sacred cows’ but letting them out to pasture may be more beneficial than trying to fit the dog to the cow! (I know it’s a poor metaphor.)
